Major and very significant input clarification to the following so-called block-buster story vis-à-vis the Bidens and their woes, at least according to Trump and his team of dirty tricksters led by Rudy Giuliani (again, or so it seems).
From
Vox.com this report and very troubling on many levels with this
headline:
“Trump team makes
suspicious effort to swing the election with purported Hunter Biden emails”
Right on cue mysterious & private emails of opponent have been
leaked: The leaker is Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani – who provided a copy of
a hard drive that contains photos and purported emails of Joe Biden’s son
Hunter to the New York Post.
It’s not clear whether the
emails, photos, etc. which involve Hunter and Burisma – the Ukrainian gas
company he worked for are real.
What’s even less clear is
how they ended up making their way to Giuliani — and whether illegality or
foreign interference might have been involved.
During the 2016 campaign,
Russian intelligence officers hacked DNC emails and provided them to WikiLeaks, and
then the release of Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta’s emails, occurred
in the final weeks before Election Day.
Now, Giuliani’s efforts to drum up a scandal related to the
Bidens and Burisma, a mere three weeks before the election, and with Trump
trailing in most polls appears to show that Rudy Gee is picking up where he
left off with this story in 2016.
The story of where this hard drive and leaks came from is
extremely strange and then consider this one single central question that has
naturally arisen: Was Hunter Biden’s information hacked or stolen and then
provided to Giuliani like in 2016 with the DNC-to-WikiLeaks?
The New York Post tells a
convoluted story to explain how Giuliani got the emails in 2019, and this story
raises far more questions than it answers and
curious ones to boot.
Even if we take this story at face value there are questions galore – for instance:
1. Who dropped off the
laptop in April 2019 that just happened to have a convenient Beau Biden name sticker
on it (he was the Biden son who died in May 2015 from a brain tumor)?
2. Why was April 2019 the same
month that conservative media started covering the Burisma flap?
3. Why was the laptop
never reclaimed?
4. Why was Hunter Biden’s personal
information and bath pictures on his dead brother’s laptop?
5. Why was the laptop
given to Giuliani’s lawyer not to him?
6. What is the Federal
government’s interest in this case?
Timeline: It all started in April 2019, when an unidentified
man went to a computer repair shop, to drop off a water-damaged laptop.
The shop owner (listed as anonymous) claims the man never
returned to reclaim the laptop.
He says he recovered data from it and, lo and behold, he
discovered there were emails and photos related to Hunter Biden.
He also claims he told the Feds about it, and they seized
the laptop and hard drive in December 2019.
He claims he copied the hard drive first and then provided
it to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.
Months later, somehow still unknown how or from whom, former
top Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, learned of the hard drive and it was he who told
the NY Post about it.
Then Giuliani provided the hard drive to the New York Post on
Sunday, October 4 – some 10 months after having apparently keeping it under
wraps.
Giuliani also spent several months working with Andrii Derkach, a member
of the Ukrainian parliament – whom BTW just recently was identified and
sanctioned by the Trump Treasury Department and labeled as a Russian agent
waging a “…covert influence campaign to affect the election by releasing
information about purported Joe Biden wrongdoing.”
On top of that, Burisma was reportedly hacked late last year and a security
firm attributed that hack to the Russian military, so there are many reasons to
question what actually happened in this case.
Plus, it’s unclear whether the emails are authentic or not,
or what they mean.
Evidently there were some photos of Hunter Biden on the hard
drive (the New York Post published them) with their reporters claiming an
explicit video of Hunter Biden is on there as well (not published).
However, all this does not
necessarily mean the emails on the hard drive are authentic and not altered. It
would certainly be possible for a nefarious actor to fabricate or alter some
documents among a trove of largely accurate ones. In that vein the NY Post
story does not mention any effort to authenticate the emails.
In that vein, there’s a larger
problem. If the emails, etc., are authentic, bits from them can be selectively
chosen and spun out of context to make misleading claims on a larger scale.
Trump’s team spread an unfounded conspiracy theory that Joe Biden forced out Ukraine’s
prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to protect Burisma and Hunter Biden. That makes
little or no sense, since it was the consensus position of the U.S. government with
Joe Biden, then officially in charge of and along with several Western
institutions like the IMF advocating the ouster of Shokin due to his corruption and ineffectiveness, thus he was not fired
Ukraine foreign aid would be stopped or be greatly reduced. Joe Biden did nothing
wrong at all.
But Trump’s aim is to paint Joe Biden as corrupt (for his
son’s sake), that resembles the 2016 strategy against Hillary Clinton, running
against Trump at the time.
The NY Post is also touting one purported email from Burisma
adviser Vadym Pozharskyi as the “scandalous smoking gun.” In the purported
email, Pozharskyi thanks Hunter for “…inviting me to DC and giving me an
opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together,” while proposing a
meeting date. But there’s no confirmation the meeting with Joe Biden ever happened
or, if it did, that the two men even discussed getting Shokin dismissed for his
state-proven corruption.
Final fact: Hunter Biden has had drug use issues in the past but not recently. Yes, he took lucrative jobs for foreign companies or clients that some say he was not qualified for. Perhaps, but there’s been a history of misleading information and outright misinformation pushed about him often involving both Giuliani and Bannon and here we go again
Like before this story is questionable from murky sources
and only a few weeks before this important election, and thus it should be
viewed with a great deal of skepticism and doubt.
Related coverage here
from USA TODAY and here from Market Watch, and the original story published here
from NBC News.
My 2 cents: Not much to
add except to say this is SOP for the Trump-Giuliani-Bannon dirty tricks cabal
chapter one, page one: Go after political rivals with everything you got – true
or false – matters not, just smear them.
This is classic evil, raw,
nasty, and possibly illegal shenanigans by Trump, Inc. for one purpose: To smear
Joe Biden anyway possible and get voters back in line for him. What a sneaky
louse.
Thanks for stopping by.
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